Soon after taking over as India’s central bank governor almost a year ago, Shaktikanta Das decorated his 18th floor office overlooking the Arabian Sea with two statues of Lord Jagannath, a form of the Hindu god Vishnu.

Revered in Das’s native Odisha state, Jagannath is depicted with round, lidless eyes that are always watching over the welfare of devotees. It’s an appropriate adornment.

Das, overseeing what was until recently the world’s fastest-growing major economy, has worked tirelessly to restore relations with the government after a bitter public spat led his predecessor Urjit Patel to quit. Colleagues say Das usually tucks papers under his arms at the end of the work day to continue plugging away from home.

He’s paid a hefty dividend to the finance ministry, swung into stimulus mode and eased up on bank lending restrictions — all of which Patel resisted in the face of government pressure. But there’s still much to do: the economy is losing steam on many fronts, the banking sector remains saddled with one of the world’s worst bad-debt loads and the government’s fiscal targets are slipping by the day.

Insiders say Das has turned around the mood in the bank’s Mumbai headquarters with an affable, plain-spoken approach. As one official said: He listens to everyone and then sticks to his own decision.

Among the RBI rank and file, the more academically-decorated predecessors of Patel and Raghuram Rajan were considered outsiders due to their long stints in American academia. Long-timers were put offside as in-house talent was often bypassed in senior appointments. Not with Das: in the job posting for a deputy in-charge of monetary policy, at least 25 years of government experience within India tops the priority list among requirements for the role.

Das’s communication skills have helped improve the relationship with the government. The two sides no longer spar in public and instead resolve issues internally, finance ministry officials said. A recent example being the central bank’s reservations toward the finance ministry’s proposal for what would have been India’s first overseas sovereign bond issue. The proposal, which also met with opposition from within Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own party, has been frozen.

The Reserve Bank of India has an out-sized role in the nation’s economy, making central bank-government friction a feature of policy making in the nation. Das is responsible for monetary policy, an exchange rate that’s near historic lows, supervising banks that carry one of the world’s biggest bad-debt loads, and selling bonds the government relies on to fund its yawning deficits. Most major central banks have only one or two of those duties.

It was a battle over independence that led to Patel’s early departure on Dec. 10. The cerebral and introverted Yale University-trained economist had sought to continue his predecessor Rajan’s efforts to clean up the nation’s financial sector by tightening wasteful lending by state banks and was keen to keep the RBI’s balance sheet as robust as possible in case of crisis. But as the economy slowed through 2018 and with a general election looming, Modi’s government pressed the RBI to loosen up lending restrictions to boost growth and to transfer surplus funds at the central bank.

Das, appointed on Dec. 11 for a three-year term, set about changing course almost immediately. In one of his first decisions announced in early January, he instructed banks to restructure stressed loans given to small and medium-scale enterprises, thus breaking from a five-year-old policy of eschewing corporate debt overhauls. That was quickly followed up by lifting lending restrictions on three state-run banks.